Revealed: the $42,000 taxpayer grant given to anti-Israel artist behind Jewish WhatsApp group leak

Matt Chun received a $42,452 taxpayer grant in May 2023 to publish a picture book. He previously co-wrote works that attacked ‘colonial and imperialist’ statues.

Artist, writer and picture book creator Matt Chun.

An anti-Israel children’s author involved in disseminating the details of dozens of Jewish Australian creatives has received more than $40,000 in taxpayers’ money to pen a book about the police, after previously co-writing works questioning Australia Day and attacking “colonial” statues.

Matt Chun – whom The Australian has previously reported was apparently involved in the wide leaking of hundreds of Jewish creatives’ details from a WhatsApp group – received the grant from Creative Australia last year.

Details of the grant had not been publicly known until now.

In response to a question on notice in Senate estimates, Creative Australia said Chun – real name Matthew Jones – received a $42,452 grant at the end of May 2023 to publish a picture book by August 2025.

“Policing in Australia: a collaborative illustrated book project by Amy McQuire and Matt Chun,” the project description reads. “Matt will contribute his experience as an artist, writer, and children’s author.

“This project will deepen Matt and Amy’s proven collaborative partnership, which led to the creation of the successful, 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards shortlisted children’s picture book Day Break.”

Day Break by Amy McQuire and Matt Chun. The story ‘refocuses the narratives around Australia Day on Indigenous survival and resistance’.

Day Break bills itself as a picture book that “refocuses the narratives around Australia Day on Indigenous survival and resistance” and one that would “open up a conversation on truth-telling for the next generation”.

Chun has previously opined on the police. In 2022, he wrote in Overland – “Australia’s only radical literary magazine” – that “under Labor governments, the Australian state has incrementally militarised its police – a mercenary force deployed against the marginalised and the poor”.

Creative Australia, the successor to the Australia Council for the Arts, said Chun had also been the beneficiary of a $8500 grant in 2017 for “funding support for participation in an international residency at Bamboo Curtain Studio in Taiwan”.

Creative Australia clarified that its grant did not go to Chun’s book Pull it Down, a children’s picture book whose cover is a drawing of the Sydney Hyde Park James Cook statue being removed off its plinth.

Chun’s blog says the book features a “variety of flappable transitions that might allow children (and truly, readers of any age) to creatively confront the supposedly immovable objects of colonialism so frequently encountered in public space”.

Pull It Down by Matt Chun.

In Senate estimates, opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson described the book as one where “children are basically encouraged to laugh with statues being chopped off”.

“I’m deeply concerned that there are many decisions being made which are improperly funding people in this country who are supporting improper behaviour, anti-Australian hatred,” she said.

The Australian has previously reported Chun was the apparent leader of the leaking of hundreds of Jewish creatives’ details from a WhatsApp group.

“Having now read the entire transcript, I’ll research and publish a number of posts about specific individuals from this leaked group chat, and the organisations with which they intersect,” he wrote on Instagram at the time.

“The group chat confirms what we already know: Zionists are thoroughly racist, thoroughly anti-Indigenous and thoroughly committed to colonialism.”

The leaking led to abuse and harassment of people and businesses whose details were disseminated. The incident led to the acceleration of the Albanese government’s anti-doxxing reform.

Chun also split this year from the State Library of Victoria, where he was the Children’s Literature Fellow, and accused the library of having “unambiguously aligned itself with the Zionist colonial project”.

“Clearly the library’s true agenda is to uphold Zionist interests,’’ Chun wrote. “The library is enacting the very same program of career sabotage that we all saw being plotted and co-ordinated in the recently leaked Zionist group chat.

“This same strategy of censorship, intimidation and manipulation has been employed by Zionists within cultural spaces for decades.”